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The aim of this paper is to trace the correlations between socio-economic status and stereotypes in the construction of the identity of the Romani minority. To this end the paper will focus mainly on contemporary representations of the Romani people in American media, in particular the reality TV show My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding and other related shows, such as Jersey Shore and its British spin-off, Geordie Shore. In the analysis I will be interested mostly in how stereotypes are made to fit the general format of the show and, in the case of My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding, repackaged as authentic ethnic culture. The aim of the comparison is to illustrate the fact that, though both Jersey Shore and My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding claim to offer an insight into the everyday lives of a particular ethnic minority, both shows follow a similar frame that has little to do with their respective subjects’ ethnic background and more to do with their social and economic background. The overlap between social and ethnic background can prove to be particularly problematic in the case of the Roma, since there is a distinct lack of counter-narratives and, historically, Romani cultural identity has always been tied to a particular social and economic class. Thus I will also attempt to integrate these representations into a broader historical perspective on the formation of Romani identity in order to better understand the problematic nature of contemporary representations of the Roma.
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Dostoyevsky proposed a new conception of Man in the world literature. Critics have described such psychological discoveries of the writer as irrationalism, dualism, and underground. Many aspects of his Christian anthropology remained beyond the attention of the researchers. In his conception of Man there are such essential concepts as the common pseudo-human (obshchechelovek) and the panhuman (vsechelovek). The common pseudo-human is a special type of a Russian man that appeared after the reforms of Peter the Great. Unlike the British, the Germans, the French, who maintain their nationality, the Russian “common pseudo-human” strives to be anyone but Russian. Being a common pseudo-human is to be an abstract European without roots and soil. Vsechelovek is a rare word in the Russian language. Nikolai Danilevsky used this word with a capital letter to call Christ (1869). Dostoyevsky used the word pan-human without capitalization to denote a perfect Christian. It expressed the inner sense of his Pushkin Memorial speech. It was Dostoyevsky who introduced the word panhuman in Russian literature and philosophy. Konstantin Leontiev did not understand the meaning of this word. He represented “the terrible, in his opinion, pan-human” as a common pseudo-human, European, liberal, and cosmopolitan. This mistaken substitution (obshchechelovek instead of vsechelovek) is typical for Russian literary and philosophical criticism of the 20th century. For Dostoevsky, each person carries the image of God. The verbs obrazit' (to restore the image) and obozhit' (to divinize) imply the restoration of the image of God and thereby the humanization of a person. To be Russian is to become pan-human (vsechelovek), Christian. Dostoyevsky’s hero carries all possible completeness of the Creator and the Creation.
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This article presents Dostoyevsky to readers as an author praising happiness and felicity. Having lived through deep sorrows he acquired insight into another dimension of life. Like a longing pathfinder, he states the unfeigned grace of life. “Life is a gift, life is mercy, and any minute may be the age of happiness”, – this is the essence of his great novels. People are not lonesome on Earth; they are bound by invisible threads. A loner may not succeed. One heart or one consciousness attracts another one like a magnet, as if claiming: thou art... Christ, with his Love and his Sacrifice, the greatest miracle on the Earth. It is impossible to be aware of Christ’s existence and not to be joyful. Dostoyevsky reveals one of the main principles of life: when you love someone and sacrifice yourself to this person you satisfy your aspiration for a beau ideal and feel like in heavens. In this article the author analyzes selected scenes of happiness in Dostoevsky’s novels: Arkady’s and his sister Liza’s admiration for the sacrifice of their father Versilov; Alyosha and Grushen’ka, saving each other instead of committing sins and transgressing moral standards; Alyosha’s dream about the Christ’s first miracle in Cana of Galilee; Stavrogin’s dream of the Golden Age of the blessed mankind... In Dostoyevsky’s tragic novel The Possessed (The Devils, or Demons) a reader faces an image of love – mutual, sacrificial, fulfilling, and blithe. There is probably nothing similar in the history of the world literature. One can eminently feel the interconnectedness of Dostoevsky’s heroes with another, higher world that penetrates into every aspect of their lives. All of his creatures are illumed by the light of other worlds. It is clear that there cannot be darkness, despair, or hopelessness in Dostoevsky’s works, because even in the hell full of demons there is a place for righteous people, luminous (as Nikolai Berdyaev called them) and capable of love and personal sacrifice that means that the light is still shining in the darkness, and the evil darkness did not envelop it.
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Dostoevsky was a writer who actively introduced literary criticism into his novels by adapting critical comments to the nature of the characters. The same principle of the novelization of criticism was used in his Diary of a Writer. Dostoevsky went beyond expressing his opinions about other people’s works, and used to develop “fictitious persons” of critics, to compose their dialogues, to carry on polemics with real and fantastic opponents. The novelization of literary criticism is natural in the poetics of the Diary of a Writer. In the Diary of a Writer of July-August 1877 Dostoevsky argues with Tolstoy about the eighth and the last part of the novel Anna Karenina, rejected by the publishers of The Russian Messenger and was soon published as a separate book. Dostoyevsky highly appreciated the literary value of the novel, the genius of its author, but did not accept his political assessments of the Russo-Turkish war. His polemics with Tolstoy is original: he levels criticism not at the author, but at the hero. Dostoevsky takes in the Christian pathos of Tolstoy, the didactic sense of the epigraph, but blames Levin for his isolation and turning away from Christ as well as for the fact that he refuses to empathize and help his neighbor in the name of abstract principles. Dostoevsky asks Tolstoy a rhetorical question which gives a new meaning to their polemics: what does the writer teach the readers? What does literature teach them about? The answer implies responsibility which the author of the Diary calls the author of Anna Karenina to. In the final dispute an unexpected effect arises: the polemics appear as a dialogue of two geniuses, in which the disagreement makes the opponents achieve consent in front of the truth of the people.
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Chekhov was born in a very religious family and since early childhood became familiar with church practice. In the letters he wrote as a middle-aged man, he called himself an unbeliever. However, a lack of faith did not prevent him from using the Biblical words in his letters and works. This paper examines using the words from Acts and Epistles of the Apostles in Chekhov’s letters. We consider all the forms of this use: quotes, reminiscences, allusions, idioms of the New Testament’s origin, etc. The research enables us to evaluate the degree of Chekhov’s familiarity with Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, as well as the frequency and the context of his references to them. We also try to answer the question why Chekhov, being an unbeliever, uses the scriptural words so often, and we make a conclusion that scriptural words formed an integral part of his thesaurus. This, therefore, leads us to a conclusion that the researchers and readers of Chekhov need to know the Bible to understand the writer’s language.
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The article examines the genre clash of a prayer and stanzas in Alexander Blok’s poem A girl was singing in the church choir... (1905). Prayer is the main ecclesiastical source, shaping the poem’s lyric model. The genre canon of stanzas with the strophes detached substantially and compositionally, transforms the central musical theme into four scene-developments linked by dissonance. Each of the strophes in A girl was singing in the church choir... has its own semantic point (prayer – singings – illusion – enlightenment) and reveals a different content of the event, intensifies and develops the tragic theme of two worlds, intended and unintended substitutions, spiritual quest and time losses. Blok’s stanzas are poetic evidence of a modern man’s exit from a prayerful concentration. The model of “conflicting synthesis” of ecclesiastical and literary genres reflects the religious/mystical opposition in symbolism aesthetics and strengthens the tragic pathos of Blok’s lyric poetry.
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The Battle of Kulikovo is one of the most significant events in Russian history. This article studies five poems by Alexander Blok and Sergey Orlov devoted to this battle. Alexander Blok's cycle of poems On the Field of Kulikovo prophetically predicts future changes in Russia. Sergey Orlov's poems devoted to this historical event can be seen as a certain indicator of his creative evolution. The image of the homeland, as well as the image of his wife (widow), both in Blok's and Orlov's poems originates from the image of the Mother of God. Images of a celestial body used by both poets are associated with military paraphernalia and arise from the evangelical images, while the warrior image is based on the evangelical image of brotherhood. Poetic experience of Alexander Blok and Sergey Orlov reveals Orthodox roots that nourish the entire Russian culture.
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In this article, I read Andrew McGahan’s novel Underground as a criticism of the Australian government under the leadership of John Howard in the era following the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center. I draw out the satire of Howard’s perceived role as President George W. Bush’s little brother, which becomes a synecdoche for Australia’s relationship with America. I situate the novel in the context of America’s cyclically neo-colonial history in Australia and draw upon the work of Homi K. Bhabha to suggest that McGahan portrays Australians as an “in-between” people who are guilty of adopting American policies—and thereby relinquishing control of their nation’s sovereignty to America—without compunction. I further suggest that, in the tradition of satire, the novel could be read as a warning to Australians against following the United State too closely. With the rise of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, Australia has witnessed the re-emergence of the political climate that is reflected in Underground, renewing its relevance to contemporary audiences.
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The presented paper offers list of texts about St. Katherine, Alexandrian virgin and martyr, in Croatian literature, written in common Croatian language in XIV–XVIII cent. The paper starts with information about this saint in Greek and Latin cultural tradition. Croatian texts are ordered by genres. Common information about content of each of them is given.
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The text concentrates on the language program of the Czech National Revival. Special attention is paid to the typical for the period overlapping between the terms “language” and “people” and thus to preserved in language cultural, literary, state and emotional memory that should be revived for the future. The notion of language in this case is perceived as a concept that contains and summarizes the program of the National Revival. During the first quarter of the 19th century in Czech environment, namely language becomes a measure of the ethical and the aesthetic, of the “own” and the “foreign”, of the “high” and the “low”.
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The article analyzes the lexemes with the root “rad” in the short novel The Inexhaustible Cup by I. S. Shmelev. Lexemes are systematized on the basis of functional thesaurus. In the process of analysis there is detected the concept of Joy. The study of the Joy's concept enables us to make important observations in the field of Church liturgical tradition, a literary form, poetic images in the investigated text. The concept generalizes the values contained in the lexicon of the eleven ideological and thematic groups (the good force, prayer, icon, space, freedom/ will, pleasure, fun, boredom, sadness, love, art), which are grouped into two main correlated topics: the sacred and the secular. The intention of the concept of joy defines the ideological perspective of the tale as the text of spiritual life of the heroes.
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The article examines the influence of the Orthodox hymnography on Ivan Shmelev's works, using his short novel The Inexhaustible Cup as an example. The author analyzes the hymnographic level of the novel; identifies specific features of adapting liturgical poetry to the literary (fiction) text; defines the functionality of liturgical texts in the ideological and thematic, as well as imaginative and motive structure of a literary work. Comparative analysis shows that novel's poetic attributes are similar to theological terminological metaphors typical for hymnography. Moreover, the content plane of The Inexhaustible Cup, due to the semantic parallelism with Akathist and, more broadly, with the hymnographic tradition, forms the Christian dogmatic metatext, which can be called Being in Christ. This enables the reader to identify intuitively Shmelev's novel as a piece of writing, related to poetic and didactic Christian texts in its spirit and language.
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In the research on Shmelev, the second thesis in Pushkin speech is usually commented on — the one about Pushkin's mystery. The famous Dostoevsky’s speech is concluded with words about a mystery and revealing this mystery. Shmelev's reply is that "we seem to have revealed this mystery". However, the first thesis of this speech — containing a complete agreement between Shmelev and Dostoyevsky — is usually ignored. In this paper, the author polemizes with his predecessors who studied Shmelev's publicistic writings and interprets this agreement between Shmelev and Dostoevsky. The Truth of God is brought up, which is not only an individual peculiarity of Pushkin but the high road of Russian literature in general. Applicable as well to Russian culture in general. The Truth of Russian people, also known as the Truth of God, is the truth accepted by us from the font of Orthodoxy — and this is the central idea of Pushkin, which became clear to Russian exiles. In particular, it became clear because an almost thousand-year-long Russian history was forcedly interrupted in the homeland they left; this is something that, naturally, Dostoyevsky could not even think of.
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The article analyzes Andrei Platonov' short novel Dzan and sees the concept of an "act of faith" as the central element of its plot. The article provides evidence that the idea of socialism, being refracted through the Zoroastrian myth, is tested in the story for strength and genuineness. As a result, this test reveals Christian subtext in the novel, with the main character not accepting utilitarian earthly Paradise, where there is no free will, and where love to one's neighbor is contrasted with love to the distant humanity. At the end of the novel two evangelical commandments are mentioned - not by bread alone and love thy neighbor. In the late 1920s — the middle of the 1930s Andrei Platonov comes up with his own idea of soul's socialism, trying to reconcile the irreconcilable - the Christian ideal and socialism.
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The text narrates the story of the printed edition of Andrzej Słowaczyński’s vaudeville Chłopiec studukatowy, which was the first to include the golden duck legend. It reconstructs the cultural and topographical context of the 1830 performance in Teatr Rozamitości in Warsaw (Variety Theater), and traces its phonological paradoxes. The vaudeville parodied Ferdinand Raimund’s Chłop milionowy, and today it remains a valuable testimony of both urban and regional folklore. Additionally, it exposes the social-spatial perceptions of the 19th-century Varsovians. Paradoxically, Chłopiec studukatowy owes its resulting commercial success to the literary, albeit cursory interpretations of the legend which followed.
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In modern times giant panda becomes an informal symbol of China, almost as popular as images of dragon, a mythical creature and heraldic animal of China till 1928. There is an astonishing contrast between today’s popularity of panda and an almost total lack of images and mentions of this animal in ancient times. Bai xiong ‘white bear,’ a local Chinese name for giant panda was registered for the first time only in 1869, by Father Armand David, who discovered giant pandas for the Europeans, the first image of panda was printed in a French zoological book in 1874, the first logo with an image of panda was created by pilots from the American Volunteer Group in Kunming (Yunnan) in 1941. If we add to this that the word xiongmao, a modern Chinese name for giant panda, is a phraseological calque from English bear cat created at the beginning of the 20th century, that panda became subject of the traditional Chinese painting in the mid of the 20th century and the literary motif of panda gained ground only after success of a popular song in 1983, we are faced with the problem of explaining, why giant panda was unknown to ancient Chinese art and literature. Some Chinese scholars assume that panda was known by other names in ancient China. Hu Jinchu enumerates a list of 25 such names, however Slovak sinologist Stanislav Vavrovský proves, that only some of them may actually mean giant panda, although the unambiguous and decisive arguments are lacking. The authors of this paper assume that giant panda was known in ancient China, however it was not differentiated as a separate species but was regarded simply as a bear (xiong). The authors present the role of bears in the mythical stories about the origin of Chinese civilization, the archaeological findings of bear bones in neolithic and bronze age tombs, as well as the images of bears in ancient Chinese art till the end of the Han dynasty. They talk through two common bear species in China: Asian black bear and brown bear, whose some subspecies are sometimes called white. The authors take notice of the fact that the known contemporary image of giant panda as a black-and-white animal is due to the discovery of the black-and-white Sichuan subspecies of this animal by Father Davis what follows that the first specimen known to Europeans became normative subspecies. However in ancient times the giant panda habitat was much more than modern refugial areas mostly in Western Sichuan mountains. The authors assume that ancient Chinese had an opportunity to meet with other pandas, e.g. from Qinling mountains, near Xi’an, a former capitol of China, than with the normative in our times subspecies of giant panda from Sichuan. The Qinling panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca qinlingensis) is very rare in our times and having a dark brown and light brown pattern instead of „typical” black and white seems to be atypical. In ancient times because of this brownish pattern Qinling panda could not be discerned from the common brown bear. The authors assume that whenever there are images and mentions of bear in ancient Chinese art and literature, we cannot automatically exclude giant pandas.
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